This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of the art that may be related to various aspects of the present invention. The following discussion is intended to provide information to facilitate a better understanding of the present invention. Accordingly, it should be understood that statements in the following discussion are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
With the introduction of the MSC Pooling standard, several Serving MSCs (MSC-VLR) within a Pool share a broad access area. Mobiles roaming into the access area covered by the MSC Pool are directed to a selected MSC-VLR based on a defined routing algorithm. In the event that one of the MSC-VLR is taken out of service, the mobiles being served by the out of service MSC-VLR needs to be re-homed to another MSC-VLR. In order for these mobiles to receive new calls, they must be re-registered at the HLR to the other MSC-VLR. In addition, it is a system design goal for MSC Pooling, from the S.R0136-0 v2.0 standard, to minimize the interruption time for users that are registered in a MSC that breaks down.
Re-homing mobiles based on a non-triggered re-registration to another MSC-VLR may require a significant amount of time for all the mobiles to re-register. During this time, mobiles not yet re-registered would not receive calls.
Re-homing mobiles using a solution that involves proactively triggering registration notifications to the HLR via a form of mobile probing (e.g., paging) would require managing the impact to the access capacity by staggering the re-homing; and would expect to take several hours. During this time, mobiles not yet re-registered would not receive calls.